What has my relationship status got to do with my tax code?

Memorable and moving encounters with constituents often inform MPs' contributions to debates. I frequently draw upon them. During the 2010 general election campaign, I knocked on the door of a single mother who had recently left her husband because he had been violent towards her. She and her two sons were living with her mum. The father was making no financial contribution so she was working hard and her mother was helping out with childcare. This mum was angry and upset. She told me how hard she and her mother were trying to give her children a good life and to bring them up to be respectful and to work hard at school. She had heard on the news that morning that the Tories were promising a tax cut for married couples. She wanted to know what she had done wrong, why she didn't deserve the same break and if David Cameron expected or wanted her to stay in that relationship.

I remembered that mother yesterday as the House of Commons debated Labour's amendment to the Married Couple's Tax Allowance. As I listened to the debate, I felt like I had travelled back in time to the 1980s when I was a school governor in Oxfordshire. School boards had just been given the power to establish sexuality education policy. I suppose it was inevitable that in a Church of England village primary school all those years ago, this led to a vigorous debate about relationships and families. I didn't win the argument to adopt a policy which saw homosexual relationships and different kinds of family as equal. With the abolition of Section 28, equalisation of the age of consent, and same sex marriage legislation, I thought that times had changed. My argument had in time been won.

However, as we debated the tax allowance, I lost the argument all over again. I heard the same kind of language and views that I had heard in that school board almost 30 years ago; I realise that the Tories believe in the deserving and undeserving poor, but it is now clear that they also believe in the deserving and undeserving family

Speaker after speaker on the government benches spoke about families and how this policy was designed to help families. That is not what this policy does. Unless you are truly of a different time, you recognise that families come in different forms. Even this tax cut offers equal treatment to same sex marriages and civil partnerships. It was a strange experience to hear Tories who had voted against equal marriage standing up for tax breaks for couples they didn't think had the right to marry.

That wasn't the only illogical case advanced by Tory MPs. They declared that married parents of poorer families are more likely to stay together. I am sorry if this sounds flippant, but that doesn't sound like an argument for giving them more money. We had Tory after Tory proclaiming that children, adults and even grandparents have better outcomes when marriage works. They confused correlations with causation and failed to make the link as to why these outcomes of marriage should result in a tax cut, Surely these people feel blessed enough and would rather, in a time of austerity, that the state used its resources to help those in greater need.

There was much talk of families in this debate - Tim Loughton MP referred to what "these families deserve". This is just one example of the government being careless and potentially offensive in the way they framed this debate. He and his colleagues were not speaking about helping families; they were talking about helping married couples with children. Unless they believe theirs is the only definition of a family. Just as oranges are not the only fruit, married couples with children are not the only families. Even then, their offer will only reach one third of married couples.

That is not my real problem with this tax policy, nor is the objection raised by many that widows, widowers, people who have left abusive relationships, kinship carers and many others would miss out. I don't want to talk about deserving and undeserving single parent families either. That is the politics of division - the politics of this Tory/Lib Dem government. It is none of my business if someone asks for my help, what their relationship status is, neither is it the business of government or HMRC. A parent raising a family on their own deserves our support if they want and need it. That should not be conditional on whether they were the "guilty" party in the breakup of a relationship, or if they were ever in a relationship, because we all have a stake in helping every family raise healthy, happy and useful citizens.

I am going to do it again, what young people describe as "oversharing". When my marriage of 23 years ended, it was a traumatic and upsetting experience. In many ways it was like bereavement, with a destructive helping of shame and guilt and, for afters, the strain of trying to support and reassure our four children. A tax break wouldn't have saved my marriage and when I was giving myself a hard time for having failed at the most important relationship of my adult life, I didn't need a letter from HMRC telling me that my tax code was going to change.

I, and their father, spent more than two decades doing our best to provide for my four children, to guide and support them in the hope they would become useful and caring members of society. My sons and daughter are now making families of their own. It makes me beyond happy to see that having children is something they want to do and how well they are doing it. I do my best not to interfere in their lives now they are grown, to accept them for the people they have become and the choices they have made. It is none of my business if they have chosen to marry or not to marry and it certainly is none of the business of this government.

Europe’s last Blairite: Can Manuel Valls win the French presidency?

The election of François Hollande as the president of France in 2012 coincided with the high-water mark of Ed Miliband’s leadership of the Labour Party. That year, Labour posted its best local election results in 17 years, gaining 823 councillors and winning control of 32 councils in a performance that has not yet been surpassed or equalled.

Gazing across the Channel, the Milibandites were given hope. Hollande showed that a wonkish career politician could triumph over a charismatic centre-right incumbent.

The UK’s shattered Blairites looked to a different star rising in French politics: Manuel Valls. At the time of Hollande’s victory, Valls was the mayor of Évry, a small suburb of Paris, where he made a name for himself by campaigning against halal supermarkets.

His father, Xavier, was a Spanish painter and his mother, Luisangela, was Swiss-Italian. They met and married in Paris, and Valls was born in Barcelona while the couple were on holiday.

In 2009 Valls urged the Parti Socialiste (PS) to drop the adjective “socialist” from its name, and he ran for the presidential nomination two years later on what he described as a Blairiste platform. This included scrapping the 35-hour working week, which hardly applies outside of big business and the public sector but carries symbolic weight for the French left. Valls’s programme found few supporters and he came fifth in a field of six, with just 6 per cent of the vote.

Yet this was enough to earn him the post of interior minister under Hollande. While Valls’s boss quickly fell from favour – within six months Hollande’s approval ratings had dropped to 36 per cent, thanks to a budget that combined tax rises with deep spending cuts – his own popularity soared.

He may have run as an heir to Blair but his popularity in France benefited from a series of remarks that were closer in tone to Ukip’s Nigel Farage. When he said that most Romany gypsies should be sent “back to the borders”, he was condemned by both his activists and Amnesty International. Yet it also boosted his approval ratings.

One of the facets of French politics that reliably confuse outsiders is how anti-Islamic sentiment is common across the left-right divide. Direct comparisons with the ideological terrain of Westminster politics are often unhelpful. For instance, Valls supported the attempt to ban the burkini, saying in August, “Marianne [the French symbol] has a naked breast because she is feeding the people! She is not veiled, because she is free! That is the republic!”

By the spring of 2014, he was still frequently topping the charts – at least in terms of personal appeal. A survey for French Elle found that 20 per cent of women would like to have “a torrid affair” with the lantern-jawed minister, something that pleased his second wife, Anne Gravoin, who pronounced herself “delighted” with the poll. (She married Valls in 2010. He also has four children by his first wife, Nathalie Soulié.)

Yet it was a chilly time for the French left, which was sharply repudiated in municipal elections, losing 155 towns. Hollande sacked his incumbent prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, and appointed Valls in his place. He hoped, perhaps, that some of Valls’s popularity would rub off on to him.

And perhaps Valls, a student of “Third Way” politics, hoped that he could emulate the success of Bill Clinton, who turned sharply to the right following Democratic losses in the US 1994 midterm elections and won a great victory in 1996. Under Valls’s premiership, Hollande’s administration swung right, implementing tough policies on law and order and pursuing supply-side reforms in an attempt to revive the French economy. Neither the economic recovery, nor the great victory, emerged.

With the date of the next presidential election set for 2017, Hollande was in trouble. His approval ratings were terrible and he faced a challenge from his former minister Arnaud Montebourg, who resigned from the government over its rightward turn in 2014.

Then, on 27 November, Prime Minister Valls suggested in an interview that he would challenge the incumbent president in the PS primary. After this, Hollande knew that his chances of victory were almost non-existent.

On 1 December, Hollande became the first incumbent French president ever to announce that he would not run for a second term, leaving Valls free to announce his bid. He duly stood down as prime minister on 5 December.

Under the French system, unless a single candidate can secure more than half of the vote in the first round of the presidential election, the top two candidates face a run-off. The current polls rate Marine Le Pen of the Front National as the favourite to win the first round, but she is expected to lose the second.

Few expect a PS candidate to make the run-off. So Hollande’s decision to drop out of his party’s primary turns that contest into an internal struggle for dominance rather than a choice of potential leader for France. The deeper question is: who will rebuild the party from the wreckage?

So although Valls has the highest international profile of the left’s candidates, no one should rule out a repeat of his crushing defeat in 2011.

He once hoped to strike a Blairite bargain with the left: victory in exchange for heresy. Because of the wasting effect of his years in Hollande’s government, however, he now offers only heresy. It would not be a surprise if the Socialists preferred the purity of Arnaud Montebourg.

Stephen Bush is special correspondent at the New Statesman. His daily briefing, Morning Call, provides a quick and essential guide to British politics.